normalizing horrible

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“If you can’t say something nice, say something mean.”

 

“Being mean is a talent, not a flaw.”

 

“Being kind is easy. Being mean is an art.”

Its not easy being mean

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Business is infamous for normalizing horrible. Business has always had guys (yes, they are mostly men) who have treated people horribly, acted horribly, did things morally and ethically horrible, and, yet, have been given a ‘pass’ because of, well, uhm, results. Business associated their horribleness with their ‘style to generate the results business desires/needs.” Their horribleness is normalized as “what needs to be done to get good shit done.” What is truly horrible about all this is that it destroys any respect for the institution of business and the institutions, principles, that underly good business.

Which leads me to Trump.

Trump is not only consistently horrible; he has normalized being horrible. While being horrible used to be in the purview of the hallways of business, it has now gone mainstream with Trump. With trump we are trapped between our respect for the institution of the presidency and a man who has no respect for the institution. I’ve competed against asshats like him my entire career. He elevates tertiary benefits implying they are more important than a primary benefit. He attempts to make everything liquid so a pebble seems solid as iron. He relentlessly diminishes and destroys everything around him so that even as a mental midget he stands taller than anything else. He thrives on being mentioned in the same breath as you because it somehow legitimizes his illegitimacy. He is so consistently horrible in his rhetoric it has become a feature of who and what he is.

Which leads me to Trump’s consistency.

Everything is horribly consistent about him. He built a career by making small look big, the minority sound like the majority and show a thread but talk a tapestry. He uses scraps to make a dinner. Truth doesn’t exist in his universe just scraps of information to be wielded like chaff to avoid a missile. I could have just written “zero evidence that any thought was given,” but I will just say T\this is the most vapid, hollow, intellectually empty, business person I believe I have ever encountered. He has no motto, ideology, morals or ethics other than zero-sum and winner takes all. He skates, & always has, on the thin ice of superficial irrelevance & ignorance. He is a horrible person who is horribly consistent.

Which leads me to Trump as a president.

I am a business guy & I think this whole Trump presidency thing is batshit crazy. All of it. The way he views America is not the America I know. With all due respect to anyone who voted for Trump, the whole Trump schtick is batshit crazy. His presidency was one batshit crazy week after another filled with batshit crazy day after batshit crazy day. In fact, its not crazy to think he is batshit crazy. That said. With the sheer amount of shit Trump throws up against the wall it becomes difficult to see anything but, well, shit. That said. There ais no lack of people trying to convince us it isn’t really shit. In other words, he is horrible and they are trying to convince us he is not horrible. That’s batshit crazy.

“This is stone cold crazy. After a week of crazy.”

Susan Rice

But. As a business guy I will point out two things to show how batshit crazy this whole situation is:

• If he were running a business like this, he would be fired

This is not how businesses are run. No. He is not running the country like a high speed business. He is running it like a transactional manager with poorly thought out plans who just wants to do shit to show he is doing something … and, on top of that, has no clue how to adapt the shit if it goes to shit. Faster paced businesses only run faster because they are willing to plan, go and quickly adapt. Faster paced businesses understand the name of the game is “adapt or die” if they want to go with some speed. But, for the most part, they are not making shit up on the fly and the really big shit has been planned for.

Oh. One other thing about fast paced businesses. Alignment. Unity in vision.

Speed, in business, has a lot to do with gravity and mass. If you want your organization to be successful AND move at a good pace, you remove barnacles and you make sure everyone on the crew knows where you are going and have talked through the intent before you say “let’s go.” And you maybe even show everyone, on some map, where you are trying to get to <this helps everyone adapt because you don’t screw them up stopping them from doing something while adapting if you know they have the same end objective everyone else has>. Trump sees people as barnacles to be scarped off, experts as barnacles to be scraped off, effective policy implementers as barnacles to be scraped off, basically he wants to scrape off everything that ensures value creation. Needless to say, that is a horrible vision.

Anyway. Our larger batshit crazy concern really has nothing to do with the pace.

• Cabal decision making

Yeah. He works in a cabal fashion. It feels like it is a couple of people who have a very dark vision of who and what America should be, maybe a couple of flunkies who want to suck up to the Trumpster because they want something and the circus ringleader himself — the Trumpster. Uhm. How would you feel if you were a senior manager in a company and he pulled shit like this? How would you feel if you were one of his chosen cabinet members? His eventual cabinet was a horrible joke. They were mostly people with no experience and actually didn’t support the mission of their particular purview. But it didn’t really matter how horrible they were, they just did whatever the horrible flunkies encouraging horrible Trump decision-making to do.

“why does he need me … he seems to want to do it all on his own.”

It appears a small band of slightly off-kilter individuals are making decisions for all of us. They are not involving even their senior management let alone the congress — who represent, us, the people — and shooting off orders on what should be done <which inevitably, in this universe, is supposed to reflect what we are supposed to think>.

That is a dictator/cabal and not a “business leader.”

Okay. Let’s be generous and say that this is classic ‘top/down’ management. If it is, top/down works if you are leading a cult or you have a one-person company. If you have an organization of any significant size, let’s say … uhm … 330 million or so … you need some buy in at a number of levels and, even better, some of the lower management levels even contribute to the tactics. That said, if it is ‘top/down’ management, it is just horribly incompetent leadership. If it is a cabal, it is not a democracy.

This is batshit crazy for America and we should never normalize this type of horrible.

Which leads me to the so called “Trump economy.”

What a bunch of horseshit is being thrown around with regard to how ‘good’ the Trump years economy was. Horseshit.

I said this back in 2018 during the Trump presidency:

• Trump’s tariffs will destroy more manufacturing jobs than it creates;
• Kim’s successful nuke tests made him happy to talk and Trump agreeing to a summit is a US concession;
• Pace of job growth has slowed since Obama era;
• The budget deficit is exploding.

They did.

It was.

And it remained so.

It did.

I bring this up circling back to my opening point. Business normalizes horribleness with “results.” The whole Trump/MAGA narrative revolves around “orange man bad ignores great results.”

The more difficult thing is to create a menu of objectives, balance them all out as important, and set about a plan of action to attain them in which you remained positive on almost all fronts and accept the fact you will sacrifice some ‘higher highs’ on some items on the menu for positives on all fronts.

This business management choice is more difficult because anyone with half a brain could pull out one thing on the menu and point out how it could be done better and be doing better. While this isn’t about administration comparisons, I will say this is one topic which the Obama administration didn’t get enough credit for.

“I believe that it is just a matter of time before our party pays a heavy price for President Trump’s reckless spending and shortsighted financial policies, his erratic, destabilizing foreign policy and his disregard for environmental concerns.”

McKean

Just to wrap this last thought up. Reality suggests the United States economy, driven by the current administration, is not only healthy now, but embedding some healthy aspects for the future. This reality is not reflective of the Trump administration reality (either as judged within the administrative years or as a judgement of how and what they did as an impact on the present). The Trump economy was wobbly, at best, and girded by subsidies and government support. In this one case I would suggest the Trump economy wasn’t horrible, but there were going to eventually be horrible consequences for how they maintained that not-horrible economy.

In the end, we can’t let Trump normalize horrible any more than it had already been normalized. You don’t have to be a shitty, horrible, person in order to get good shit done. You don’t have to be a shitty, horrible, amoral, person to ‘beat the system.’ We deserve a non-horrible person leading a country let alone a business. Ponder.